11 February 2026: A new study on the Intra-species differences in impacts of climate change on hooded seal

A study by Vacquié-Garcia and colleagues, titled “Intra-species differences in impacts of climate change: A case study of the hooded seal (Cystophora cristata)”, was published in the journal Ecosphere in December 2025.

The Arctic is warming nearly four times faster than the global average, but at different rates across the region. Arctic species like the hooded seal are often divided into multiple populations that may be geographically or reproductively isolated. It remains unclear how different climate change rates are affecting populations of the same species, and how each of them will respond in the future.

Vacquié-Garcia and colleagues investigated how different populations of hooded seals are reacting to climate change. The authors analysed how environmental changes affected the hooded seals’ diet and their foraging behaviour, including their distribution and habitat use, in the Greenland Sea over a time series ranging from the early 1990s to the late 2000s, and how future climate scenarios could affect them. They then compared the findings with previously published information on hooded seals from the Northwest Atlantic (waters between Northeastern Canada and Southeastern Greenland).

This study demonstrated that Greenland Sea hooded seals have maintained consistent habitat preferences and diets. However, their foraging areas have shifted eastward towards the coast of Iceland and the Faroe Islands, rather than northward as seen for the Northwest Atlantic hooded seals. These trends are expected to continue according to future projections. Such a pattern would be unexpected for an ice-associated Arctic species, as climate change usually forces them to move northwards in search of cold-water refuge. These results underscore the importance of considering behavioural differences at a population level when assessing a species response to environmental changes.

You can read the full article by Vacquié-Garcia et al., here: https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.70482

Photo credit: Michael Poltermann.